Loose Ends
by Ms.MM
Summary: Kitty Riley was never meant to be more than an instrument.


Kitty Riley opened the published article she'd written, not bothering to do more than skim it. After all, she'd reread it countless times, gone over all the facts, reviewed dozens of things with Richard to make sure she'd not missed a detail. If there was one thing she'd never been accused of being, it was lazy. Manipulative, cruel, and more recently, repellant, but never lazy.

She absentmindedly tapped the picture of Holmes's arrest with one finger, relaxing into her chair. The pair of broken handcuffs from that night were probably still somewhere in her flat, but she hadn't had the time to really look for them.

Not that there was much use for a dead man's broken cuffs anyway.

Kitty grimaced. As much as Sherlock Holmes had lied about, the suicide still somehow rubbed her the wrong way. It was hard to pin down, but there was definitely something strange about it. Proud as she was for having knocked him off his pedestal rather spectacularly, he had never come off to her as someone who would take such a final solution to a problem…

She shook off the thoughts by running her hands through her hair and stretching, accidentally knocking the paper to the floor.

A piece of small, white stationery fluttered out of the pages. Bending at the knees, she picked it up and turned it over.

_Hullo darling. Do us a favor and look in the shirt Rich Brook left behind. I wouldn't recommend not following my instructions. X_

Kitty's hands started to shake. She walked into her bedroom and dug through her top dresser drawer, finding the v-neck he'd left on her floor. She could feel something stiff and rectangular inside the folded t-shirt. As she hastily unfolded it, a thought crossed her mind: _Bit funny, a piece of paper telling me what to do for once._ The note inside his shirt was brief and to the point.

_Good girl. Kitchen. XX_

Numbly, Kitty moved into the kitchen, and immediately saw the note sitting squarely on her counter. It was lying facedown. She slid it across the smooth surface towards her and flipped it over, vaguely wondering in the back of her mind when the person who left these notes broke in.

_Sweet, sweet, Kitty Cat. You were so easy to fool. Smart, I suppose, but not in the way you thought. Check the loo. XXX_

"The loo? Really?" Kitty mumbled. The fourth note was wedged neatly under a bar of soap.

_And you thought I was just a part in a play. But you didn't, did you? Not all the way. You like the idea of a supervillain to Sherlock's hero. Nice shoes. XXX J_

She instinctively glanced down at the shoes she was wearing, before realized that was ridiculous. Nobody had touched them for at least a day, and the notes certainly weren't in her flat that morning.

After rummaging through several pairs of shoes, Kitty found a pair of dressy black heels that were overpriced but had lasted ages. They had imprints from where her heel and toes pressed into them so often.

Except now the somewhat dirty indentations were gone. The insides of both shoes were freshly resewn with a flesh-colored material that was curling at one end. Kitty picked at the peeling part and pulled it roughly up and off. A white corner poked out, and she grasped it with her thumb and forefinger.

_I didn't like the man who donated his outsides to those insides._ Kitty understood quite suddenly, and dropped the shoe with a shrill, quiet cry. The note continued gleefully: _Anyway, terribly sorry to do this to you. But quite frankly, you're a loose end. Mantelpiece, off you pop. XXX JM_

The initials on the note seemed to clatter loudly inside Kitty's skull, not allowing any other thoughts to squeeze through. Her thumb had smudged the spiky, black ink as she pressed it to the card, walking to the mantelpiece with her mouth open in a small O. There it was, under a snow globe her grandmother had given her as a girl.

_You were a very good, useful, pretty little tool. The problem with tools, though, is that they can be stolen and used by somebody else. Unless they're broken._

_XXX Jim Moriarty_

A laser sight positioned itself squarely on Kitty's temple.


End file.
